Expert: MARK A. HOWELL - 4/14/2009

Question
QUESTION: I would like to ask your help on history of artillery. About when the fist time men found explosive powder, first time men use canon, until now.

Thankyou very much and I'm very appreciate for your help.

ANSWER: Thomas,
You're in luck, military history is my speciality.  How many pages do you need?
Glad to help,
Colonel H

PS.  Thomas, I assume I'm helping you write a report for school.  What grade level?  I have a Ph.D. in history and I don't want to be writing at the Ph.D. level when it's for 8th grade, etc.
I'll help you get an "A+"
Colonel H

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Ok then, as information, I'm a junior officer of Indonesian Navy, and I'm attending Junior Officer Artillery Course, so I need a complete information about artillery.

Thankyou very much and I appreciate so much for your help sir.

Answer
Thomas,
I hope this helps.
Colonel H

HISTORY OF ARTILLERY

Artillery is basically any large weapon used for discharging projectiles.   The word is derived from the Latin word artillaria, which means equipment of war.

The earliest artillery was weapons such as catapults and arbalests (a powerful medieval crossbow with a steel bow, used to shoot stones, metal balls, arrows, etc.).

Nowadays, artillery refers to mounted projectile-firing guns or missile launchers, mobile or stationary, light or heavy, as distinguished from small arms.

Artillery made a giant leap forward when gunpowder was invented.   It is widely believed gunpowder was developed accidently by the Chinese in 142 AD.   It's unknown what they were trying to invent, but like so many other products in use today, gunpowder was a byproduct of another experiment.

A century and a half later, a Chines scientist wrote down the ingredients of gunpowder and described the explosion.  Scientists made gunpowder by mixing sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter, or potassium nitrate.  You get sulfur by mining it out of the ground, where it exists naturally as a yellowish rock.  You can make potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, by taking animal manure and letting it sit and decay for a while.  Then potassium nitrate crystals formed in the manure, and you could drain them off by washing water through the manure pile.  You mix the three powders together, using about fifteen parts of saltpeter to three parts of charcoal and two parts of sulfur.  The reason gunpowder explodes is that it burns very fast, and when it burns it releases gases that are larger in volume than the original powder.

It was under the rule of the T'ang Dynasty, about 700 AD, that people really began to use gunpowder.  T'ang Dynasty inventors realized the potential use of gunpowder for powerful weapons.  First the Army used gunpowder in the form of rockets.  They put small stone cannonballs inside bamboo tubes and shot the cannonballs out by lighting gunpowder at one end.  This is basically the same idea that makes guns and cannons work today.
The Chinese emperors tried to keep their discovery secret, but by the 1100's AD their secret had gotten out, and people in the Islamic Empire and the Roman Empire began to understand how to use gunpowder for weapons.  After that, it wasn't long before people in Europe also learned how to use gunpowder.  By 1216 AD, a monk named Roger Bacon in England described gunpowder as a weapon.  By the 1300's, inventors in both China and Europe had invented the cannon, a bronze tube which used gunpowder to shoot heavy iron balls at the enemy, usually at the walls of a castle under siege.

Bronze was initially preferred for guns because of its relative ease of casting compared to iron.  Melting iron requires a higher temperature, and the iron casting process is much more sensitive to oxygen, chemical impurities and the balance of alloying ingredients than bronze.  Although good quality cast-iron guns were available in the early 16th century they were expensive and the failure rate was high.  Iron was eventually preferred because once the casting process was perfected, iron guns could be lighter for the same amount of strength and cheaper.  Bronze (or other copper alloys) continued in use for some presentation guns and for some types of smaller guns or those intended for high-accuracy applications.   Also, the art of casting bronze or iron was not common, and many countries had to import guns or import the craftsmen to make them.  The Netherlands was an early center of gunfounding, and several countries established their own foundries around Dutch masters.

Smoothbore tubes fired lead, iron, or stone balls, sometimes large arrows and on occasions simply handfuls of whatever scrap came to hand.  Initially known as the bombard it later became called the cannon.  The bombard was a large-caliber, front-loading medieval cannon used chiefly for throwing heavy stone balls. The modern term bombardment derives from this.

In 1451, a Hungarian gunmaker built the largest known bombard for the Turkish Sultan
Mehmet II.  The cannon was 8 meters long, had a barrel diameter of 750mm (30 inches), fired a cannon ball weighing 700kg and took 400 men and 60 oxen to move it into position.  It was tested on a foreign trade vessel outside of the coast of the Byzantine border . The ship was smashed to pieces by only one shot.  Mehemet took the cannon to Constantinople, where he used it to destroy the city walls.  With a reload time of 3 hours, the walls stood up to 90 days of bombardment before the Turks took the city.  The new Turkish cannon was actually so big that normal wooden construction couldn't stand the mighty recoil from the cannon.  Instead, they suspended the cannon from several ropes tied to a wooden frame.  By doing this, the recoil was absorbed by the ropes rather than the wood.  The Fall of Constantinople was "the first event of supreme importance whose result was determined by the use of artillery."

Cannons were always loaded from the muzzles.  While there were many early attempts at breech-loading designs, a lack of engineering knowledge rendered these even more dangerous to use than muzzle-loaders.

In the Medieval era, a lord built a castle or walled city as a fortification against attackers.   With the advent of cannons and artillery, the stone walls became useless as a means of defense.   To help counter heavy artillery, castles began being built with sloping or angled walls that were much thicker, thus causing cannonballs to bounce off.  Therefore castles were almost always attacked at their weakest point, the heavy wooden and metal doors.

In the 15th century cannon-makers began making the barrel smaller and mounting them on wheeled carriages , thus producing mobile field pieces that could move and support an army in action, rather than being found only in siege and static defenses.  However, because cannon were too slow to reload and cumbersome to move quickly, they were easily lost to a rapid enemy advance.

The method of firing the cannon involved the use of a match to light a small quantity of powder charge in a touchhole drilled into the breech. This technique was quite faulty because the ignited powder could easily be extinguished by rain and an excess amount of charge could cause the guns to burst.

The combining of shot and powder into a single unit, a cartridge, occurred in the 1620s and was quickly adopted by all nations.  It speeded loading and made it safer.

In the 18th century, the French mass produced cannon with a flintlock firing device, much like small arms rifles.  The French Emperor Napoleon was a former artillery officer and perfected the tactic of massed artillery batteries unleashed upon a critical point in his enemies' line as a prelude to infantry and cavalry assault and, more often than not, victory.

Beginning in the 1860s, artillery was made a series of rapid technological and operational changes.  Rifled barrels enabled artillery pieces to be more accurate at long ranges.  This was noted in the American Civil War where the South could only afford to buy old smoothbore cannon from other countries.  These cannon were accurate to 300 yards, whereas the North manufactured their own rifled-barrel cannons which were accurate to 650 yards.  Also the first effective breech-loaders allowed a gun crew to operate while always behind protective barriers were developed in the 1880s.  The first cannon to contain all 'modern' features is generally considered to be the French 75 of 1897 with its cased ammunition, effective breech-loading, modern sights, self-contained firing mechanism, and hydro-pneumatic recoil dampening.

Modern artillery is most obviously distinguished by its large caliber, firing an explosive shell or rocket, and being of such a size and weight as to require a specialized carriage for firing and transport.  However, its most important characteristic is the use of indirect fire, whereby the firing equipment is aimed without seeing the target through its sights.  Indirect fire emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and was greatly enhanced by the development of predicted fire methods in World War I.  Indirect fire uses firing data set on the sights, predicted fire methods ensure that this data is accurate and corrects for variations from the standard conditions for muzzle velocity, temperature, wind and air density.

Weapons covered by the term 'modern artillery' include "cannon" artillery such as the howitzer, mortar, field gun and rocket artillery. Certain smaller-caliber mortars are more properly designated small arms rather than artillery, albeit indirect-fire small arms.  This term also came to include coastal artillery which traditionally defended coastal areas against seaborne attack and controlled the passage of ships.  With the advent of powered flight at the start of the 20th century, artillery also included ground-based anti-aircraft batteries.

The term "artillery" has traditionally not been used for projectiles with internal guidance systems, even though some artillery units employ surface-to-surface missiles.  Advances in terminal guidance systems for small munitions has allowed large-caliber projectiles to be developed, blurring this distinction.

Since modern long-range artillery uses indirect-fire, target acquisition and accuracy must be relayed by a forward observer, either on the ground or airborne in close proximity to the target. In the mid-1970s several armies started equipping their artillery observation teams with laser rangefinders, ground surveillance radars and night vision devices, these were soon followed by inertial orienting and navigating devices to improve the accuracy of target locations. GPS provided a smaller and cheaper means of quick and accurate fixation for target acquisition devices.

Therefore field artillery is usually deployed as a system, where communications is an integral part.  Whether the artillery is shipborne, on railroad, or wheeled, the typical artillery system consists of command, control, communications, target acquisition, production of firing data, fire units, and logistics support.

There are several different types of fire support for tactical purposes.  These are Counterbattery Fire, Counterpreparation Fire, Covering Fire, Defensive Fire, Final Protective Fire, Harassing Fire, Interdiction Fire, Preparation Fire, Deep Supporting Fire, Close Supporting Fire, Neutralization Fire, and Suppression Fire.

Artillery is usually deployed as Field Artillery Teams, composed of the forward observer , the Fire Direction Center  and the actual guns themselves. The Forward Observer observes the target using tools such as binoculars and laser rangefinders and call back fire missions on his radio, or relays the data through a portable computer via an encrypted digital radio connection protected from jamming by computerized frequency hopping.
The FO can communicate directly with the battery FDC, of which there is one per each battery of 4–8 guns. Otherwise the several FOs communicate with a higher FDC such as at a Battalion level, and the higher FDC prioritizes the targets and allocates fires to individual batteries as needed to engage the targets that are spotted by the FOs or to perform preplanned fires.
The Battery FDC computes firing data—ammunition to be used, powder charge, fuse settings, the direction to the target, and the quadrant elevation to be fired at to reach the target, what gun will fire any rounds needed for adjusting on the target, and the number of rounds to be fired on the target by each gun once the target has been accurately located—to the guns. Traditionally this data is relayed via radio or wire communications as a warning order to the guns, followed by orders specifying the type of ammunition and fuse setting, direction, and the elevation needed to reach the target, and the method of adjustment or orders for fire for effect (FFE). However in more advanced artillery units, this data is relayed through a digital radio link.
Other parts of the field artillery team include meteorological analysis to determine the temperature, humidity and pressure of the air and wind direction and speed at different altitudes. Also radar is used both for determining the location of enemy artillery and mortar batteries and to determine the precise actual strike points of rounds fired by battery and comparing that location with what was expected to compute a registration allowing future rounds to be fired with much greater accuracy.